It’s Independence Day and we’ll be taking the grandkids to the neighborhood parade, a children’s affair of handmade floats, flag-waving, family dogs, hot dogs, the Fourth’s whole nine yards capped off with fireworks.

If you need proof that this country is independently wealthy, it’s on full patriotic display throughout San Diego County.

Exceptionally proud and happy to be an American?

Today, yes, you bet. Flags flying on porches. Grills fired up. The Fourth. It’s the original groove in the American grain.

Today, my native sense of patriotism is Pavlovian, triggered by the laughter of carefree little children.

For others, however, patriotism is not as simple as a slice of apple pie.

Two days before the Fourth, a Holocaust survivor I’ve known for some 25 years wrote me from her Fallbrook home, leading with this stunner:

“Proud to be an American? Not these days.”

For this woman who emigrated from Europe and prospered here, patriotism is dimmed by recent events to her south and north.

“First Escondido and now Murrieta have turned refugees away,” Ruth Harber wrote with a broad brush.

“The God-fearing and churchgoing naysayers there remind me of the Voyage of the St. Louis (also called the Voyage of the Damned) when ships were not allowed to dock in the various ports back in Hitler’s days. Finally, tiny Belgium took them in, unfortunately to be run over by the Germans.

Through the prism of her horrific experience, the Central American children throwing themselves upon the mercy of the United States appear to be refugees fleeing evil, brown-skinned variations of herself as a child, not de facto criminals or symbols of Obama’s border policies running amok.

Since bracero days, illegal border-crossing has been a gold mine for heartbreaking pathos — remember the families rushing against traffic in the early ‘90s? — but the spectacle of a children’s crusade begging for asylum would have stressed out Dickens.

Please, señor, I want some more chance to live.

It requires the wisdom of Solomon, a commodity in short supply, to sort through the flood of humanity and make just decisions.

The question is: Through what prism of experience do we behold these children and our obligation to them?

Immigration courts are overwhelmed, and many asylum seekers blow off court appearances, fading into the shadows where 11 million undocumented migrants survive.

Politicians natter on in the press but don’t move on reform for fear of blowback from their bases.